This story is part of
Cory Doctorow’s 2007 short story collection “Overclocked: Stories
of the Future Present,” published by Thunder’s Mouth, a division
of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you’ll
find more at the end of this file.

This story and the
other stories in the volume are available at:

http://craphound.com/overclocked

You can buy Overclocked
at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20

In the words of Woody
Guthrie:

“This song is
Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of
28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will
be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish
it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s
all we wanted to do.”

Overclocked is
dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.

—

Introduction to
Anda’s Game

The easiest way to
write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with
rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day.

Anda’s Game is a
sterling example of this approach. I ripped a story from the
headlines—reports on blogs about a stunning presentation at a
video-games conference about “gold farmers” in latinamerica who
were being paid a pittance “grind” (undertake boring, repetitive
wealth-creating tasks in a game) with the product of their labor sold
on to rich northern gamers who wanted to level-up without all the
hard work.

The practice of gold
farming became more and more mainstream, growing with the online
role-playing game industry and spreading around the world (legend has
it that the Chinese rice harvest was endangered because so many real
farmers had quit the field to pursue a more lucrative harvest in
virtual online gold). Every time one of these stories broke, I was
lionized for my spectacular prescience in so accurately predicting
the gold-farming phenomenon—I had successfully predicted the
present.

Anda’s Game tries to
square up the age-old fight for rights for oppressed minorities in
the rich world with the fight for the rights of the squalid,
miserable majority in the developing world. This tension arises again
and again, and it affords a juicy opportunity to play different
underclasses off against one another. Think of how handily Detroit’s
auto-workers were distracted from GM’s greed when they were given
Mexican free-trade-zone labor to treat as a scapegoat; the American
worker’s enemy isn’t the Mexican worker, it’s the auto
manufacturer who screws both of them. They fought NAFTA instead of
GM, and GM won

This was the first of
several stories I’ve written with titles from famous sf stories and
novels (Anda’s Game sounds a lot like “Ender’s Game” when
pronounced in a British accent). I came to this curious practice as a
response to Ray Bradbury describing Michael Moore as a crook for
repurposing the title “Fahrenheit 451” as “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
Bradbury doesn’t like Moore’s politics, and didn’t want his
seminal work on free speech being used to promote opposing political
ideology.

Well, this is just too
much irony to bear. Titles have no copyright, and science fiction is
a field that avidly repurposes titles—it seems like writing a story
called “Nightfall” is practically a rite of passage for some
writers. What’s more, the idea that political speech (the
comparison of the Bush regime to the totalitarian state of Fahrenheit
451) should be suppressed because the author disagrees is
antithetical to the inspiring free speech message that shoots through
Fahrenheit 451.

So I decided to start
writing stories with the same titles as famous sf, and to make each
one a commentary, criticism, or parody of the cherished ideas of the
field. Anda’s Game was the first of these, but it’s not the
last—I, Robot appears elsewhere in this volume, and I’m almost
finished a story called True Names that Ben Rosenbaum and I have been
tossing back and forth for a while. After that, I think it’ll be
The Man Who Sold the Moon, and then maybe Jeffty is Five.

I sold this story to
Salon, and it was later reprinted in Michael Chabon’s Best American
Short Stories (a story written by a Canadian about Brits, no less!),
and it was later podcasted by retired pro Quake player Alice Taylor
for my podcast.

—

Anda’s Game

(Originally
published on Salon, November 2004)

Anda didn’t really
start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar.
She was 12, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf, because her
parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an
instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive
would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the
only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You
could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl
looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in
tiny, pointless leather bikini-armor. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was 12,
she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible
tits and sensible armor and a bloody great sword that she was clearly
very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting
and massaging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid
sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE kit was at the bottom of her
school-bag and her face was that stupid red color that she hated
and now it was stinking maths which was hardly better than PE but at
least she didn’t have to sweat.

But instead of maths,
all the girls were called to assembly, and Liza the Organiza stood on
the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks the principal and Mrs Danzig,
the useless counsellor.

“Hullo chickens,”
Liza said. She had an Australian accent. “Well, aren’t you lot
just precious and bright and expectant with your pink upturned faces
like a load of flowers staring up at the sky?

“Warms me fecking
heart it does.”

That made her laugh,
and she wasn’t the only one. Miss Cruickshanks and Mrs Danzig
didn’t look amused, but they tried to hide it.

“I am Liza the
Organiza, and I kick arse. Seriously.” She tapped a key on her
laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a game—not the one
that Anda played, but something space-themed, a space-station with a
rocketship in the background. “This is my avatar.” Sensible
boobs, sensible armor, and a sword the size of the world. “In-game,
they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the Spacelanes, El Presidente of
the Clan Fahrenheit.” The Fahrenheits had chapters in every game.
They were amazing and deadly and cool, and to her knowledge, Anda had
never met one in the flesh. They had their own island in her
game. Crikey.

On screen, The
Lizanator was fighting an army of wookie-men, sword in one hand,
laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning, strafing,
making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and
ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.

“The whole
Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular election, but they
voted me in cos of my prowess in combat. I’m a
world-champion in six different games, from first-person shooters to
strategy games. I’ve commanded armies and I’ve sent armies to
their respawn gates by the thousands. Thousands, chickens: my battle
record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I have taken home cash
prizes from competitions totaling more than 400,000 pounds. I game
for four to six hours nearly every day, and the rest of the time, I
do what I like.

“One of the things I
like to do is come to girls’ schools like yours and let you in on a
secret: girls kick arse. We’re faster, smarter and better than
boys. We play harder. We spend too much time thinking that we’re
freaks for gaming and when we do game, we never play as girls because
we catch so much shite for it. Time to turn that around. I am the
best gamer in the world and I’m a girl. I started playing at 10,
and there were no women in games—you couldn’t even buy a game in
any of the shops I went to. It’s different now, but it’s still
not perfect. We’re going to change that, chickens, you lot and me.

“How many of you
game?”

Anda put her hand up.
So did about half the girls in the room.

“And how many of you
play girls?”

All the hands went
down.

“See, that’s a
tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace smells like a boy’s
armpit. It’s time we girled it up a little. So here’s my
offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given
probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure
up, in six months, you’ll be full-fledged members.”

In real life, Liza the
Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with
confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly
at her shoulders. She dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees
with giant, goth boots with steel toes that looked like something
you’d see in an in-game shop, though Anda was pretty sure they’d
come from a real-world goth shop in Camden Town.

She stomped her boots,
one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the stage. “Who’s in,
chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?”

Anda jumped to her
feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it
that she didn’t notice that she was the only one standing. The
other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.

“That’s all right,
love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t let those staring
faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to look at the sky.
Pink scrubbed shining expectant faces. They’re looking at you
because you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity
came—and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a
leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse. Welcome to the Clan
Fahrenheit.”

She began to clap, and
the other girls clapped too, and even though Anda’s face was the
color of a lollipop-lady’s sign, she felt like she might burst with
pride and good feeling and she smiled until her face hurt.

#

> Anda,

her sergeant said to
her,

> how would you
like to make some money?

> Money, Sarge?

Ever since she’d
risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they
paid gold—money wasn’t really something you talked about
in-game.

Anda looked around. Her
door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting-room
watching something loud on telly. She turned up her music just to be
safe and then slipped on her headset. They said it could noise-cancel
a Blackhawk helicopter—it had better be able to overcome the little
inductive speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She
switched to voice.

“Hey, Lucy,” she
said.

“Call me Sarge!”
Lucy’s accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived
somewhere in the middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa
or Ohio. She was Anda’s best friend in-game but she was so hardcore
it was boring sometimes.

“Hi Sarge,” she
said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She’d never
smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was harder to remember to
keep to the game norms.

“That’s a bit
weird, Sarge. Is that against Clan rules?” There were a lot of Clan
rules about what kind of mission you could accept and they were
always changing. There were curb-crawlers in gamespace and the way
that the Clan leadership kept all the mummies and daddies from going
ape-poo about it was by enforcing a long, boring code of conduct that
was meant to ensure that none of the Fahrenheit girlies ended up
being virtual prozzies for hairy old men in raincoats on the other
side of the world.

“What?” Anda loved
how Lucy quacked What? It sounded especially American. She had
to force herself from parroting it back. “No, geez. All the
executives in the Clan pay the rent doing missions for money. Some of
them are even rich from it, I hear! You can make a lot of money
gaming, you know.”

“Is it really true?”
She’d heard about this but she’d assumed it was just stories,
like the kids who gamed so much that they couldn’t tell reality
from fantasy. Or the ones who gamed so much that they stopped eating
and got all anorexic. She wouldn’t mind getting a little anorexic,
to be honest. Bloody podge.

“Yup! And this is our
chance to get in on the ground floor. Are you in?”

“It’s not—you
know, pervy, is it?”

“Gag me. No. Jeez,
Anda! Are you nuts? No—they want us to go kill some guys.”

“Oh, we’re good at
that!”

#

The mission took them
far from Fahrenheit Island, to a cottage on the far side of the
largest continent on the gameworld, which was called Dandelionwine.
The travel was tedious, and twice they were ambushed on the trail,
something that had hardly happened to Anda since she joined the
Fahrenheits: attacking a Fahrenheit was bad for your health, because
even if you won the battle, they’d bring a war to you.

But now they were far
from the Fahrenheits’ power-base, and two different packs of
brigands waylaid them on the road. Lucy spotted the first group
before they got into sword-range and killed four of the six with her
bow before they closed for hand-to-hand. Anda’s sword—gigantic
and fast—was out then, and her fingers danced over the keyboard as
she fought off the player who was attacking her, her body jerking
from side to side as she hammered on the multibutton controller
beside her. She won—of course! She was a Fahrenheit! Lucy had
already slaughtered her attacker. They desultorily searched the
bodies and came up with some gold and a couple scrolls, but nothing
to write home about. Even the gold didn’t seem like much, given the
cash waiting at the end of the mission.

The second group of
brigands was even less daunting, though there were 20 of them. They
were total noobs, and fought like statues. They’d clearly clubbed
together to protect themselves from harder players, but they were no
match for Anda and Lucy. One of them even begged for his life before
she ran him through,

> please sorry u
cn have my gold sorry!!!11!

Anda laughed and sent
him to the respawn gate.

> You’re a
nasty person, Anda,

Lucy typed.

> I’m a
Fahrenheit!!!!!!!!!!

she typed back.

#

The brigands on the
road were punters, but the cottage that was their target was guarded
by an altogether more sophisticated sort. They were spotted by
sentries long before they got within sight of the cottage, and they
saw the warning spell travel up from the sentries’ hilltop like a
puff of smoke, speeding away toward the cottage. Anda raced up the
hill while Lucy covered her with her bow, but that didn’t stop the
sentries from subjecting Anda to a hail of flaming spears from their
fortified position. Anda set up her standard dodge-and-weave pattern,
assuming that the sentries were non-player characters—who wanted to
pay to sit around in gamespace watching a boring road all
day?—and to her surprise, the spears followed her. She took one in
the chest and only some fast work with her shield and all her healing
scrolls saved her. As it was, her constitution was knocked down by
half and she had to retreat back down the hillside.

“Get down,” Lucy
said in her headset. “I’m gonna use the BFG.”

Every game had one—the
Big Friendly Gun, the generic term for the baddest-arse weapon in the
world. Lucy had rented this one from the Clan armory for a small
fortune in gold and Anda had laughed and called her paranoid, but now
Anda helped Lucy set it up and thanked the gamegods for her
foresight. It was a huge, demented flaming crossbow that fired
five-meter bolts that exploded on impact. It was a beast to arm and a
beast to aim, but they had a nice, dug-in position of their own at
the bottom of the hill and it was there that they got the BFG set up,
deployed, armed and ranged.

“Fire!” Lucy
called, and the game did this amazing and cool animation that it
rewarded you with whenever you loosed a bolt from the BFG, making the
gamelight dim towards the sizzling bolt as though it were sucking the
illumination out of the world as it arced up the hillside, trailing a
comet-tail of sparks. The game played them a groan of dismay from
their enemies, and then the bolt hit home with a crash that made her
point-of-view vibrate like an earthquake. The roar in her headphones
was deafening, and behind it she could hear Lucy on the voice-chat,
cheering it on.

“Nuke ‘em till they
glow and shoot ‘em in the dark! Yee-haw!” Lucy called, and Anda
laughed and pounded her fist on the desk. Gobbets of former enemy
sailed over the treeline dramatically, dripping hyper-red blood and
ichor.

In her bedroom, Anda
caressed the controller-pad and her avatar punched the air and did a
little rugby victory dance that the All-Blacks had released as a
limited edition promo after they won the World Cup.

Now they had to move
fast, for their enemies at the cottage would be alerted to their
presence and waiting for them. They spread out into a wide flanking
manoeuvre around the cottage’s sides, staying just outside of
bow-range, using scrying scrolls to magnify the cottage and make the
foliage around them fade to translucency.

There were four guards
around the cottage, two with nocked arrows and two with whirling
slings. One had a scroll out and was surrounded by the concentration
marks that indicated spellcasting.

“GO GO GO!” Lucy
called.

Anda went! She had two
scrolls left in her inventory, and one was a shield spell. They cost
a fortune and burned out fast, but whatever that guard was cooking
up, it had to be bad news. She cast the spell as she charged for the
cottage, and lucky thing, because there was a fifth guard up a tree
who dumped a pot of boiling oil on her that would have cooked her
down to her bones in ten seconds if not for the spell.

She power-climbed the
tree and nearly lost her grip when whatever the nasty spell was
bounced off her shield. She reached the fifth man as he was trying to
draw his dirk and dagger and lopped his bloody head off in one
motion, then backflipped off the high branch, trusting to her shield
to stay intact for her impact on the cottage roof.

The strategy worked—now
she had the drop (literally!) on the remaining guards, having
successfully taken the high ground. In her headphones, the sound of
Lucy making mayhem, the grunts as she pounded her keyboard mingling
with the in-game shrieks as her arrows found homes in the chests of
two more of the guards.

Shrieking a berzerker
wail, Anda jumped down off of the roof and landed on one of the two
remaining guards, plunging her sword into his chest and pinning him
in the dirt. Her sword stuck in the ground, and she hammered on her
keys, trying to free it, while the remaining guard ran for her
on-screen. Anda pounded her keyboard, but it was useless: the sword
was good and stuck. Poo. She’d blown a small fortune on spells and
rations for this project with the expectation of getting some real
cash out of it, and now it was all lost.

She moved her hands to
the part of the keypad that controlled motion and began to run,
waiting for the guard’s sword to find her avatar’s back and knock
her into the dirt.

“Got ‘im!” It was
Lucy, in her headphones. She wheeled her avatar about so quickly it
was nauseating and saw that Lucy was on her erstwhile attacker,
grunting as she engaged him close-in. Something was wrong, though:
despite Lucy’s avatar’s awesome stats and despite Lucy’s own
skill at the keyboard, she was being taken to the cleaners. The guard
was kicking her ass. Anda went back to her stuck sword and
recommenced whanging on it, watching helplessly as Lucy lost her left
arm, then took a cut on her belly, then another to her knee.

“Shit!” Lucy said
in her headphones as her avatar began to keel over. Anda yanked her
sword free—finally—and charged at the guard, screaming a
ululating war cry. He managed to get his avatar swung around and his
sword up before she reached him, but it didn’t matter: she got in a
lucky swing that took off one leg, then danced back before he could
counterstrike. Now she closed carefully, nicking at his sword-hand
until he dropped his weapon, then moving in for a fast kill.

“Lucy?”

“Call me Sarge!”

“Sorry, Sarge.
Where’d you respawn?”

“I’m all the way
over at Body Electric—it’ll take me hours to get there. Do you
think you can complete the mission on your own?”

“Uh, sure.”
Thinking, Crikey, if that’s what the guards outside were
like, how’m I gonna get past the inside guards?

She wished she had
another scrying scroll in inventory so she could get a look inside
the cottage before she beat its door in, but she was fresh out of
scrolls and just about everything else.

She kicked the door in
and her fingers danced. She’d killed four of her adversaries before
she even noticed that they weren’t fighting back.

In fact, they were
generic avatars, maybe even non-player characters. They moved like
total noobs, milling around in the little cottage. Around them were
heaps of shirts, thousands and thousands of them. A couple of the
noobs were sitting in the back, incredibly, still crafting more
shirts, ignoring the swordswoman who’d just butchered four of their
companions.

She took a careful look
at all the avatars in the room. None of them were armed. Tentatively,
she walked up to one of the players and cut his head off. The player
next to him moved clumsily to one side and she followed him.

“Are you a player or
a bot?” she typed.

The avatar did nothing.
She killed it.

“Lucy, they’re not
fighting back.”

“Good, kill them
all.”

“Really?”

“Yeah—that’s the
orders. Kill them all and then I’ll make a phone call and some guys
will come by and verify it and then you haul ass back to the island.
I’m coming out there to meet you, but it’s a long haul from the
respawn gate. Keep an eye on my stuff, OK?”

“Sure,” Anda said,
and killed two more. That left ten. One two one two and through
and through, she thought, lopping their heads off. Her vorpal
blade went snicker-snack. One left. He stood off in the back.

> no porfa
necesito mi plata

Italian? No, Spanish.
She’d had a term of it in Third Form, though she couldn’t
understand what this twit was saying. She could always paste the text
into a translation bot on one of the chat channels, but who cared?
She cut his head off.

“They’re all dead,”
she said into her headset.

“Good job!” Lucy
said. “OK, I’m gonna make a call. Sit tight.”

Bo-ring. The cottage
was filled with corpses and shirts. She picked some of them up. They
were totally generic: the shirts you crafted when you were down at
Level 0 and trying to get enough skillz to actually make something of
yourself. Each one would fetch just a few coppers. Add it all
together and you barely had two thousand gold.

Just to pass the time,
she pasted the Spanish into the chatbot.

> no
[colloquial] please, I need my [colloquial] [money|silver]

Pathetic. A few
thousand golds—he could make that much by playing a couple of the
beginner missions. More fun. More rewarding. Crafting shirts!

She left the cottage
and patrolled around it. Twenty minutes later, two more avatars
showed up. More generics.

> are you
players or bots?

she typed, though she
had an idea they were players. Bots moved better.

> any trouble?

Well all right then.

> no trouble

> good

One player entered the
cottage and came back out again. The other player spoke.

> you can go now

“Lucy?”

“What’s up?”

“Two blokes just
showed up and told me to piss off. They’re noobs, though. Should I
kill them?”

“No! Jeez, Anda,
those are the contacts. They’re just making sure the job was done.
Get my stuff and meet me at Marionettes Tavern, OK?”

Anda went over to
Lucy’s corpse and looted it, then set out down the road, dragging
the BFG behind her. She stopped at the bend in the road and snuck a
peek back at the cottage. It was in flames, the two noobs standing
amid them, burning slowly along with the cottage and a few thousand
golds’ worth of badly crafted shirts.

#

That was the first of
Anda and Lucy’s missions, but it wasn’t the last. That month, she
fought her way through six more, and the paypal she used filled with
real, honest-to-goodness cash, Pounds Sterling that she could
withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 meters away from the
schoolgate, next to the candy shop that was likewise 501 meters away.

“Anda, I don’t
think it’s healthy for you to spend so much time with your game,”
her da said, prodding her bulging podge with a finger. “It’s not
healthy.”

“Daaaa!” she said,
pushing his finger aside. “I go to PE every stinking day. It’s
good enough for the Ministry of Education.”

“I don’t like it,”
he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little pot belly that
he wore his belted trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin and two
bat wings of flab hanging off his upper arms. She pinched his chin
and wiggled it.

“I get loads more
exercise than you, Mr Kettle.”

“But I pay the bills
around here, little Miss Pot.”

“You’re not
seriously complaining about the cost of the game?” she said,
infusing her voice with as much incredulity and disgust as she could
muster. “Ten quid a week and I get unlimited calls, texts and
messages! Plus play of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and
spellchecker and translator bots!” (this was all from rote—every
member of the Fahrenheits memorized this or something very like it
for dealing with recalcitrant, ignorant parental units) “Fine then.
If the game is too dear for you, Da, let’s set it aside and I’ll
just start using a normal phone, is that what you want?”

Her Da held up his
hands. “I surrender, Miss Pot. But do try to get a little
more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?”

“Getting my head
trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like,” she said, darkly.

“Zackly!” he said,
prodding her podge anew. “That’s the stuff! Getting my head
trodden on was what made me the man I are today!”

Her Da could bluster
all he liked about paying the bills, but she had pocket-money for the
first time in her life: not book-tokens and fruit-tokens and
milk-tokens that could be exchanged for “healthy” snacks and
literature. She had real money, cash money that she could spend
outside of the 500 meter sugar-free zone that surrounded her school.

She wasn’t just
kicking arse in the game, now—she was the richest kid she knew, and
suddenly she was everybody’s best pal, with handsful of Curly
Wurlies and Dairy Milks and Mars Bars that she could selectively
distribute to her schoolmates.

#

“Go get a BFG,”
Lucy said. “We’re going on a mission.”

Lucy’s voice in her
ear was a constant companion in her life now. When she wasn’t on
Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running missions into the wee
hours of the night. The Fahrenheit armorers, non-player-characters,
had learned to recognise her and they had the Clan’s BFGs oiled and
ready for her when she showed up.

Today’s mission was
close to home, which was good: the road-trips were getting tedious.
Sometimes, non-player-characters or Game Masters would try to get
them involved in an official in-game mission, impressed by their
stats and weapons, and it sometimes broke her heart to pass them up,
but cash always beat gold and experience beat experience points:
Money talks and bullshit walks, as Lucy liked to say.

They caught the first
round of sniper/lookouts before they had a chance to attack or send
off a message. Anda used the scrying spell to spot them. Lucy had
kept both BFGs armed and she loosed rounds at the hilltops flanking
the roadway as soon as Anda gave her the signal, long before they got
into bow range.

As they picked their
way through the ruined chunks of the dead player-character snipers,
Anda still on the lookout, she broke the silence over their
voicelink.

“Hey, Lucy?”

“Anda, if you’re
not going to call me Sarge, at least don’t call me ‘Hey, Lucy!’
My dad loved that old TV show and he makes that joke every visitation
day.”

“Sorry, Sarge.
Sarge?”

“Yes, Anda?”

“I just can’t
understand why anyone would pay us cash for these missions.”

“You complaining?”

“No, but—”

“Anyone asking you to
cyber some old pervert?”

“No!”

“OK then. I don’t
know either. But the money’s good. I don’t care. Hell, probably
it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all
day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”

“You really think
that?”

Lucy sighed a put-upon,
sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it this way. Most of the
world is living on like a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every
day on a frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends mom three
thousand a month in child-support—that’s a hundred bucks a day.
So if a day’s money here is a hundred dollars, then to a African or
whatever my frappuccino is worth like five hundred dollars.
And I buy two or three every day.

“And we’re not
rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t think twice
about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee—how much do you think
a hotdog and a Coke go for on the space station? A thousand bucks!

“So that’s what I
think is going on. There’s someone out there, some Saudi or
Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that this is just
chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess around with some
other rich person. To them, we’re like the Africans making a dollar
a day to craft—I mean, sew—t-shirts. What’s a couple hundred
bucks to them? A cup of coffee.”

Anda thought about it.
It made a kind of sense. She’d been on hols in Bratislava where
they got a posh hotel room for ten quid—less than she was spending
every day on sweeties and fizzy drinks.

“Three o’clock,”
she said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers pat-patted in bits
around the forest floor.

“Nice one, Anda.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

#

They smashed half a
dozen more sniper outposts and fought their way through a couple
packs of suspiciously bad-ass brigands before coming upon the
cottage.

“Bloody hell,” Anda
breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards, forty or fifty of them,
with bows and spells and spears, in entrenched positions.

“This is nuts,”
Lucy agreed. “I’m calling them. This is nuts.”

There was a muting
click as Lucy rang off and Anda used up a scrying scroll to examine
the inventories of the guards around the corner. The more she looked,
the more scared she got. They were loaded down with spells, a couple
of them were guarding BFGs and what looked like an even bigger
BFG, maybe the fabled BFG10K, something that was removed from the
game economy not long after gameday one, as too disruptive to the
balance of power. Supposedly, one or two existed, but that was just a
rumor. Wasn’t it?

“OK,” Lucy said.
“OK, this is how this goes. We’ve got to do this. I just called
in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob prentices for
backup.” Anda summed that up in her head to a hundred player
characters and maybe three hundred nonplayer characters: familiars,
servants, demons;

“That’s a lot of
shares to split the pay into,” Anda said.

“Oh ye of little
tits,” Lucy said. “I’ve negotiated a bonus for us if we make
it—a million gold and three missions’ worth of cash. The
Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold—they’ll be here in an
hour.”

This wasn’t a mission
anymore, Anda realized. It was war. Gamewar. Hundreds of players
converging on this shard, squaring off against the ranked mercenaries
guarding the huge cottage over the hill.

#

Lucy wasn’t the
ranking Fahrenheit on the scene, but she was the designated general.
One of the gamers up from Fahrenheit Island brought a team flag for
her to carry, a long spear with the magical standard snapping proudly
from it as the troops formed up behind her.

“On my signal,”
Lucy said. The voice chat was like a wind-tunnel from all the unmuted
breathing voices, hundreds of girls in hundreds of bedrooms like
Anda’s, all over the world, some sitting down before breakfast,
some just coming home from school, some roused from sleep by their
ringing game-sponsored mobiles. “GO GO GO!”

They went, roaring, and
Anda roared too, heedless of her parents downstairs in front of the
blaring telly, heedless of her throat-lining, a Fahrenheit in
berzerker rage, sword swinging. She made straight for the BFG10K—a
siege engine that could level a town wall, and it would be hers,
captured by her for the Fahrenheits if she could do it. She spelled
the merc who was cranking it into insensibility, rolled and rolled
again to dodge arrows and spells, healed herself when an arrow found
her leg and sent her tumbling, springing to her feet before another
arrow could strike home, watching her hit points and experience
points move in opposite directions.

HERS! She vaulted the
BFG10K and snicker-snacked her sword through two mercs’ heads. Two
more appeared—they had the thing primed and aimed at the main body
of Fahrenheit fighters, and they could turn the battle’s tide just
by firing it—and she killed them, slamming her keypad, howling,
barely conscious of the answering howls in her headset.

Now she had the
BFG10K, though more mercs were closing on her. She disarmed it
quickly and spelled at the nearest bunch of mercs, then had to take
evasive action against the hail of incoming arrows and spells. It was
all she could do to cast healing spells fast enough to avoid losing
consciousness.

“LUCY!” she called
into her headset. “LUCY, OVER BY THE BFG10K!”

Lucy snapped out orders
and the opposition before Anda began to thin as Fahrenheits fell on
them from behind. The flood was stemmed, and now the Fahrenheits’
greater numbers and discipline showed. In short order, every merc was
butchered or run off.

Anda waited by the
BFG10K while Lucy paid off the Fahrenheits and saw them on their way.
“Now we take the cottage,” Lucy said.

“Right,” Anda said.
She set her character off for the doorway. Lucy brushed past her.

“I’ll be glad when
we’re done with this—that was bugfuck nutso.” She opened the
door and her character disappeared in a fireball that erupted from
directly overhead. A door-curse, a serious one, one that cooked her
in her armor in seconds.

“SHIT!” Lucy said
in her headset.

Anda giggled. “Teach
you to go rushing into things,” she said. She used up a
couple scrying scrolls making sure that there was nothing else in the
cottage save for millions of shirts and thousands of unarmed noob
avatars that she’d have to mow down like grass to finish out the
mission.

She descended upon them
like a reaper, swinging her sword heedlessly, taking five or six out
with each swing. When she’d been a noob in the game, she’d had to
endure endless fighting practice, “grappling” with piles of
leaves and other nonlethal targets, just to get enough experience
points to have a chance of hitting anything. This was every bit as
dull.

Her wrists were getting
tired, and her chest heaved and her hated podge wobbled as she worked
the keypad.

> Wait, please,
don’t—I’d like to speak with you

It was a noob avatar,
just like the others, but not just like it after all, for it moved
with purpose, backing away from her sword. And it spoke English.

> nothing
personal

she typed

> just a job

> There are many
here to kill—take me last at least. I need to talk to you.

> talk, then

she typed. Meeting
players who moved well and spoke English was hardly unusual in
gamespace, but here in the cleanup phase, it felt out of place. It
felt wrong.

> My name is
Raymond, and I live in Tijuana. I am a labour organizer in the
factories here. What is your name?

> i don’t give
out my name in-game

> What can I
call you?

> kali

It was a name she liked
to use in-game: Kali, Destroyer of Worlds, like the Hindu goddess.

> Are you in
India?

> london

> You are
Indian?

> naw im a
whitey

She was halfway through
the room, mowing down the noobs in twos and threes. She was hungry
and bored and this Raymond was weirding her out.

> Do you know
who these people are that you’re killing?

She didn’t
answer, but she had an idea. She killed four more and shook out her
wrists.

> They’re
working for less than a dollar a day. The shirts they make are traded
for gold and the gold is sold on eBay. Once their avatars have
leveled up, they too are sold off on eBay. They’re mostly young
girls supporting their families. They’re the lucky ones: the
unlucky ones work as prostitutes.

Her wrists really
ached. She slaughtered half a dozen more.

> The bosses
used to use bots, but the game has countermeasures against them.
Hiring children to click the mouse is cheaper than hiring programmers
to circumvent the rules. I’ve been trying to unionize them because
they’ve got a very high rate of injury. They have to play for
18-hour shifts with only one short toilet break. Some of them can’t
hold it in and they soil themselves where they sit.

> look

she typed, exasperated.

> it’s none of
my lookout, is it. the world’s like that. lots of people with no
money. im just a kid, theres nothing i can do about it.

> When you kill
them, they don’t get paid.

no porfa necesito mi
plata

> When you kill
them, they lose their day’s wages. Do you know who is paying you to
do these killings?

She thought of Saudis,
rich Japanese, Russian mobsters.

> not a clue

> I’ve been
trying to find that out myself, Kali.

They were all dead now.
Raymond stood alone amongst the piled corpses.

> Go ahead

he typed

> I will see you
again, I’m sure.

She cut his head off.
Her wrists hurt. She was hungry. She was alone there in the enormous
woodland cottage, and she still had to haul the BFG10K back to
Fahrenheit Island.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m
almost back there, hang on. I respawned in the ass end of nowhere.”

“Girls. Little girls
in Mexico. Getting paid a dollar a day to craft shirts. Except they
don’t get their dollar when we kill them. They don’t get
anything.”

“Oh, for chrissakes,
is that what one of them told you? Do you believe everything someone
tells you in-game? Christ. English girls are so naive.”

“You don’t think
it’s true?”

“Naw, I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t, OK?
I’m almost there, keep your panties on.”

“I’ve got to go,
Lucy,” she said. Her wrists hurt, and her podge overlapped the
waistband of her trousers, making her feel a bit like she was
drowning.

“What, now? Shit,
just hang on.”

“My mom’s calling
me to supper. You’re almost here, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

She reached down and
shut off her PC.

#

Anda’s Da and Mum
were watching the telly again with a bowl of crisps between them. She
walked past them like she was dreaming and stepped out the door onto
the terrace. It was nighttime, 11 o’clock, and the chavs in front
of the council flats across the square were kicking a football around
and swilling lager and making rude noises. They were skinny and
rawboned, wearing shorts and string vests with strong, muscular limbs
flashing in the streetlights.

“Anda?”

“Yes, Mum?”

“Are you all right?”
Her mum’s fat fingers caressed the back of her neck.

“Yes, Mum. Just
needed some air is all.”

“You’re very
clammy,” her mum said. She licked a finger and scrubbed it across
Anda’s neck. “Gosh, you’re dirty—how did you get to be such a
mucky puppy?”

“Owww!” she said.
Her mum was scrubbing so hard it felt like she’d take her skin off.

“No whingeing,” her
mum said sternly. “Behind your ears, too! You are filthy.”

“Mum, owwww!”

Her mum dragged her up
to the bathroom and went at her with a flannel and a bar of soap and
hot water until she felt boiled and raw.

“What is this
mess?” her mum said.

“Lilian, leave off,”
her dad said, quietly. “Come out into the hall for a moment,
please.”

The conversation was
too quiet to hear and Anda didn’t want to, anyway: she was
concentrating too hard on not crying—her ears hurt.

Her mum enfolded her
shoulders in her soft hands again. “Oh, darling, I’m sorry. It’s
a skin condition, your father tells me, Acanthosis Nigricans—he saw
it in a TV special. We’ll see the doctor about it tomorrow after
school. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she
said, twisting to see if she could see the “dirt” on the back of
her neck in the mirror. It was hard because it was an awkward
placement—but also because she didn’t like to look at her face
and her soft extra chin, and she kept catching sight of it.

She went back to her
room to google Acanthosis Nigricans.

> A condition
involving darkened, thickened skin. Found in the folds of skin at the
base of the back of the neck, under the arms, inside the elbow and at
the waistline. Often precedes a diagnosis of type-2 diabetes,
especially in children. If found in children, immediate steps must be
taken to prevent diabetes, including exercise and nutrition as a
means of lowering insulin levels and increasing insulin-sensitivity.

Obesity-related
diabetes. They had lectures on this every term in health class—the
fastest-growing ailment among British teens, accompanied by photos of
orca-fat sacks of lard sat up in bed surrounded by an ocean of
rubbery, flowing podge. Anda prodded her belly and watched it jiggle.

It jiggled. Her thighs
jiggled. Her chins wobbled. Her arms sagged.

She grabbed a handful
of her belly and squeezed it, pinched it hard as she could,
until she had to let go or cry out. She’d left livid red
fingerprints in the rolls of fat and she was crying now, from the
pain and the shame and oh, God, she was a fat girl with diabetes—

#

“Jesus, Anda, where
the hell have you been?”

“Sorry, Sarge,” she
said. “My PC’s been broken—” Well, out of service, anyway.
Under lock-and-key in her dad’s study. Almost a month now of
medications and no telly and no gaming and double PE periods at
school with the other whales. She was miserable all day, every day
now, with nothing to look forward to except the trips after school to
the newsagents at the 501-meter mark and the fistsful of sweeties and
bottles of fizzy drink she ate in the park while she watched the
chavs play footy.

“Well, you should
have found a way to let me know. I was getting worried about you,
girl.”

“Sorry, Sarge,” she
said again. The PC Baang was filled with stinky spotty boys—literally
stinky, it smelt like goats, like a train-station toilet—being loud
and obnoxious. The dinky headphones provided were greasy as a slice
of pizza, and the mouthpiece was sticky with excited boy-saliva from
games gone past.

But it didn’t matter.
Anda was back in the game, and just in time, too: her money was
running short.

“Well, I’ve got a
backlog of missions here. I tried going out with a couple other of
the girls—” A pang of regret shot through Anda at the thought
that her position might have been usurped while she was locked off
the game “—but you’re too good to replace, OK? I’ve got four
missions we can do today if you’re game.”

“Four missions! How
on earth will we do four missions? That’ll take days!”

“We’ll take the
BFG10K.” Anda could hear the savage grin in her voice.

#

The BFG10K simplified
things quite a lot. Find the cottage, aim the BFG10K, fire it,
whim-wham, no more cottage. They started with five bolts for it—one
BFG10K bolt was made up of 20 regular BFG bolts, each costing a small
fortune in gold—and used them all up on the first three targets.
After returning it to the armory and grabbing a couple of BFGs
(amazing how puny the BFG seemed after just a couple hours’
campaigning with a really big gun!) they set out for number
four.

“I met a guy after
the last campaign,” Anda said. “One of the noobs in the cottage.
He said he was a union organizer.”

“Oh, you met Raymond,
huh?”

“You knew about him?”

“I met him too. He’s
been turning up everywhere. What a creep.”

“So you knew about
the noobs in the cottages?”

“Um. Well, yeah, I
figured it out mostly on my own and then Raymond told me a little
more.”

“I know that. That’s
why you’re my right-hand woman, why I want you at my side when I go
on a mission. We’re bad-ass, you and me, as bad-ass as they come,
and we got that way through discipline and hard work and really
caring about the game, right?”

“Yes, right, but—”

“You’ve met Liza
the Organiza, right?”

“Yes, she came by my
school.”

“Mine too. She asked
me to look out for you because of what she saw in you that day.”

“Liza the Organiza
goes to Ohio?”

“Idaho. Yes—all
across the US. They put her on the tube and everything. She’s
amazing, and she cares about the game, too—that’s what makes us
all Fahrenheits: we’re committed to each other, to teamwork, and to
fair play.”

Anda had heard these
words—lifted from the Fahrenheit mission statement—many times,
but now they made her swell a little with pride.

“So these people in
Mexico or wherever, what are they doing? They’re earning their
living by exploiting the game. You and me, we would never trade cash
for gold, or buy a character or a weapon on eBay—it’s cheating.
You get gold and weapons through hard work and hard play. But those
Mexicans spend all day, every day, crafting stuff to turn into gold
to sell off on the exchange. That’s where it comes from—that’s
where the crappy players get their gold from! That’s how rich noobs
can buy their way into the game that we had to play hard to get into.

“So we burn them out.
If we keep burning the factories down, they’ll shut them down and
those kids’ll find something else to do for a living and the game will
be better. If no one does that, our work will just get cheaper and
cheaper: the game will get less and less fun, too.

“These people don’t
care about the game. To them, it’s just a place to suck a buck out
of. They’re not players, they’re leeches, here to suck all the
fun out.”

They had come upon the
cottage now, the fourth one, having exterminated four different
sniper-nests on the way.

“Are you in, Anda?
Are you here to play, or are you so worried about these leeches on
the other side of the world that you want out?”

“I’m in, Sarge,”
Anda said. She armed the BFGs and pointed them at the cottage.

They were
photo-objects. She picked them up and then examined them. The first
showed ranked little girls, fifty or more, in clean and simple
t-shirts, skinny as anything, sitting at generic white-box PCs, hands
on the keyboards. They were hollow-eyed and grim, and none of them
older than she.

The next showed a
shantytown, shacks made of corrugated aluminum and trash, muddy
trails between them, spraypainted graffiti, rude boys loitering,
rubbish and carrier bags blowing.

The next showed the
inside of a shanty, three little girls and a little boy sitting
together on a battered sofa, their mother serving them something
white and indistinct on plastic plates. Their smiles were
heartbreaking and brave.

> That’s who
you’re about to deprive of a day’s wages

“Oh, hell, no,”
Lucy said. “Not again. I killed him last time and I said I’d do
it again if he ever tried to show me photos. That’s it, he’s
dead.” Her character turned towards him, putting away her bow and
drawing a short sword. Raymond’s character backed away quickly.

“Lucy, don’t,”
Anda said. She interposed her avatar between Lucy’s and Raymond.
“Don’t do it. He deserves to have a say.” She thought of old
American TV shows, the kinds you saw between the Bollywood movies on
telly. “It’s a free country, right?”

“God damn it,
Anda, what is wrong with you? Did you come here to play the
game, or to screw around with this pervert dork?”

> what do you
want from me raymond?

> Don’t kill
them—let them have their wages. Go play somewhere else

> They’re
leeches

Lucy typed,

> they’re
wrecking the game economy and they’re providing a gold-for-cash
supply that lets rich assholes buy their way in. They don’t care
about the game and neither do you

> If they don’t
play the game, they don’t eat. I think that means that they care
about the game as much as you do. You’re being paid cash to kill
them, yes? So you need to play for your money, too. I think that
makes you and them the same, a little the same.

> go screw
yourself

Lucy typed. Anda edged
her character away from Lucy’s. Raymond’s character was so far
away now that his texting came out in tiny type, almost too small to
read. Lucy drew her bow again and nocked an arrow.

“Lucy, DON’T!”
Anda cried. Her hands moved of their own volition and her character
followed, clobbering Lucy barehanded so that her avatar reeled and
dropped its bow.

“You BITCH!” Lucy
said. She drew her sword.

“I’m sorry, Lucy,”
Anda said, stepping back out of range. “But I don’t want you to
hurt him. I want to hear him out.”

Lucy’s avatar came on
fast, and there was a click as the voicelink dropped. Anda typed
onehanded while she drew her own sword.

> dont lucy come
on talk2me

Lucy slashed at her
twice and she needed both hands to defend herself or she would have
been beheaded. Anda blew out through her nose and counterattacked,
fingers pounding the keyboard. Lucy had more experience points than
she did, but she was a better player, and she knew it. She hacked
away at Lucy driving her back and back, back down the road they’d
marched together.

Abruptly, Lucy broke
and ran, and Anda thought she was going away and decided to let her
go, no harm no foul, but then she saw that Lucy wasn’t running
away, she was running towards the BFGs, armed and primed.

“Bloody hell,” she
breathed, as a BFG swung around to point at her. Her fingers flew.
She cast the fireball at Lucy in the same instant that she cast her
shield spell. Lucy loosed the bolt at her a moment before the
fireball engulfed her, cooking her down to ash, and the bolt collided
with the shield and drove Anda back, high into the air, and the
shield spell wore off before she hit ground, costing her half her
health and inventory, which scattered around her. She tested her
voicelink.

“Lucy?”

There was no reply.

>
I’m very sorry you and your friend quarreled.

She felt numb and
unreal. There were rules for Fahrenheits, lots of rules, and the
penalties for breaking them varied, but the penalty for attacking a
fellow Fahrenheit was—she couldn’t think the word, she closed her
eyes, but there it was in big glowing letters: EXPULSION.

But Lucy had started
it, right? It wasn’t her fault.

But who would believe
her?

She opened her eyes.
Her vision swam through incipient tears. Her heart was thudding in
her ears.

> The enemy
isn’t your fellow player. It’s not the players guarding the
fabrica, it’s not the girls working there. The people who are
working to destroy the game are the people who pay you and the people
who pay the girls in the fabrica, who are the same people. You’re
being paid by rival factory owners, you know that? THEY are the ones
who care nothing for the game. My girls care about the game. You care
about the game. Your common enemy is the people who want to destroy
the game and who destroy the lives of these girls.

“Whassamatter, you
fat little cow? Is your game making you cwy?” She jerked as if
slapped. The chav who was speaking to her hadn’t been in the Baang
when she arrived, and he had mean, close-set eyes and a football
jersey and though he wasn’t any older than she, he looked mean, and
angry, and his smile was sadistic and crazy.

“Piss off,” she
said, mustering her braveness.

“You wobbling tub of
guts, don’t you DARE speak to me that way,” he said, shouting
right in her ear. The Baang fell silent and everyone looked at her.
The Pakistani who ran the Baang was on his phone, no doubt calling
the coppers, and that meant that her parents would discover where
she’d been and then—

“I’m talking to
you, girl,” he said. “You disgusting lump of suet—Christ, it
makes me wanta puke to look at you. You ever had a boyfriend? How’d
he shag you—did he roll yer in flour and look for the wet spot?”

She reeled back, then
stood. She drew her arm back and slapped him, as hard as she could.
The boys in the Baang laughed and went whoooooo! He purpled and
balled his fists and she backed away from him. The imprint of her
fingers stood out on his cheek.

He bridged the distance
between them with a quick step and punched her, in the belly,
and the air whooshed out of her and she fell into another player, who
pushed her away, so she ended up slumped against the wall, crying.

The mean boy was there,
right in front of her, and she could smell the chili crisps on his
breath. “You disgusting whore—” he began and she kneed him
square in the nadgers, hard as she could, and he screamed like a
little girl and fell backwards. She picked up her schoolbag and ran
for the door, her chest heaving, her face streaked with tears.

#

“Anda, dear, there’s
a phone call for you.”

Her eyes stung. She’d
been lying in her darkened bedroom for hours now, snuffling and
trying not to cry, trying not to look at the empty desk where her PC
used to live.

Her da’s voice was
soft and caring, but after the silence of her room, it sounded like a
rusting hinge.

“Anda?”

She opened her eyes. He
was holding a cordless phone, sillhouetted against the open doorway.

“Who is it?”

“Someone from your
game, I think,” he said. He handed her the phone.

“Hullo?”

“Hullo chicken.” It
had been a year since she’d heard that voice, but she recognised it
instantly.

“Liza?”

“Yes.”

Anda’s skin seemed to
shrink over her bones. This was it: expelled. Her heart felt like it
was beating once per second, time slowed to a crawl.

“Hullo, Liza.”

“Can you tell me what
happened today?”

She did, stumbling over
the details, back-tracking and stuttering. She couldn’t remember,
exactly—did Lucy move on Raymond and Anda asked her to stop and
then Lucy attacked her? Had Anda attacked Lucy first? It was all a
jumble. She should have saved a screenmovie and taken it with her,
but she couldn’t have taken anything with her, she’d run out—

“I see. Well it
sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into quite a pile of poo,
haven’t you, my girl?”

“I guess so,” Anda
said. Then, because she knew that she was as good as expelled, she
said, “I don’t think it’s right to kill them, those girls. All
right?”

“Ah,” Liza said.
“Well, funny you should mention that. I happen to agree. Those
girls need our help more than any of the girls anywhere in the game.
The Fahrenheits’ strength is that we are cooperative—it’s
another way that we’re better than the boys. We care. I’m proud
that you took a stand when you did—glad I found out about this
business.”

“You’re not going
to expel me?”

“No, chicken, I’m
not going to expel you. I think you did the right thing—”

That meant that Lucy
would be expelled. Fahrenheit had killed Fahrenheit—something had
to be done. The rules had to be enforced. Anda swallowed hard.

“If you expel Lucy,
I’ll quit,” she said, quickly, before she lost her nerve.

Liza laughed. “Oh,
chicken, you’re a brave thing, aren’t you? No one’s being
expelled, fear not. But I wanta talk to this Raymond of yours.”

#

Anda came home from
remedial hockey sweaty and exhausted, but not as exhausted as the
last time, nor the time before that. She could run the whole length
of the pitch twice now without collapsing—when she’d started out,
she could barely make it halfway without having to stop and hold her
side, kneading her loathsome podge to make it stop aching. Now there
was noticeably less podge, and she found that with the ability to run
the pitch came the freedom to actually pay attention to the game, to
aim her shots, to build up a degree of accuracy that was nearly as
satisfying as being really good in-game.

Her dad knocked at the
door of her bedroom after she’d showered and changed. “How’s my
girl?”

“Revising,” she
said, and hefted her maths book at him.

“Did you have a fun
afternoon on the pitch?”

“You mean ‘did my
head get trod on’?”

“Did it?”

“Yes,” she said.
“But I did more treading than getting trodden on.” The other
girls were really fat, and they didn’t have a lot of team
skills. Anda had been to war: she knew how to depend on someone and
how to be depended upon.

“That’s my girl.”
He pretended to inspect the paint-work around the light switch. “Been
on the scales this week?”

She had, of course: the
school nutritionist saw to that, a morning humiliation undertaken in
full sight of all the other fatties.

“Yes, Dad.”

“And—?”

“I’ve lost a
stone,” she said. A little more than a stone, actually. She had
been able to fit into last year’s jeans the other day.

She hadn’t been the
sweets-shop in a month. When she thought about sweets, it made her
think of the little girls in the sweatshop. Sweatshop, sweetshop. The
sweets shop man sold his wares close to the school because little
girls who didn’t know better would be tempted by them. No one
forced them, but they were kids and grownups were supposed to
look out for kids.

Her da beamed at her.
“I’ve lost three pounds myself,” he said, holding his tum.
“I’ve been trying to follow your diet, you know.”

“I know, Da,” she
said. It embarrassed her to discuss it with him.

The kids in the
sweatshops were being exploited by grownups, too. It was why their
situation was so impossible: the adults who were supposed to be
taking care of them were exploiting them.

“Well, I just wanted
to say that I’m proud of you. We both are, your Mum and me. And I
wanted to let you know that I’ll be moving your PC back into your
room tomorrow. You’ve earned it.”

She didn’t touch the
PC the first day, nor the second. The kids in the game—she didn’t
know what to do about them. On the third day, after hockey, she
showered and changed and sat down and slipped the headset on.

“Hello, Anda.”

“Hi, Sarge.”

Lucy had known the
minute she entered the game, which meant that she was still on Lucy’s
buddy-list. Well, that was a hopeful sign.

“You don’t have to
call me that. We’re the same rank now, after all.”

Anda pulled down a menu
and confirmed it: she’d been promoted to Sergeant during her
absence. She smiled.

“Gosh,” she said.

“Yes, well, you
earned it,” Lucy said. “I’ve been talking to Raymond a lot
about the working conditions in the factory, and, well—” She
broke off. “I’m sorry, Anda.”

“Me too, Lucy.”

“You don’t have
anything to be sorry about,” she said.

They went adventuring,
running some of the game’s standard missions together. It was fun,
but after the kind of campaigning they’d done before, it was also
kind of pale and flat.

“Well, poo,” Anda
said. “I don’t wanna be bored for the rest of my life. What’re
we gonna do?”

“I was hoping you
knew.”

She thought about it.
The part she’d loved had been going up against grownups who were
not playing the game, but gaming it, breaking it for money.
They’d been worthy adversaries, and there was no guilt in beating
them, either.

“We’ll ask Raymond
how we can help,” she said.

#

“I want them to walk
out—to go on strike,” he said. “It’s the only way to get
results: band together and withdraw your labour.” Raymond’s voice
had a thick Mexican accent that took some getting used to, but his
English was very good—better, in fact, than Lucy’s.

“Walk out in-game?”
Lucy said.

“No,” Raymond said.
“That wouldn’t be very effective. I want them to walk out in
Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana. I’ll call the press in, we’ll make a
big deal out of it. We can win—I know we can.”

“So what’s the
problem?” Anda said.

“The same problem as
always. Getting them organized. I thought that the game would make it
easier: we’ve been trying to get these girls organized for years:
in the sewing shops, and the toy factories, but they lock the doors
and keep us out and the girls go home and their parents won’t let
us talk to them. But in the game, I thought I’d be able to reach
them—”